After Mrs. Burden, I went to the Quartier—the French Quarter in Soho—for a charwoman. Had I been tempted, as I never was, to believe in the entente cordiale, of which England was just then beginning to make great capital, affairs in my own kitchen would have convinced me of the folly of it. Things there had come to a pass when any pretence of cordiality, except the cordial dislike which France and England have always cherished for each other and always will, had been given up, and if I hoped to escape threats of police and perpetual squabbles on the subject of cleanliness, there was nothing for it but to adopt a single-race policy. When it came to deciding which that race should be, I did not hesitate, having found out for myself that the French are as clean as the English believe themselves to be. The Quartier could not be more French if it were in the heart of France. There is nothing French that is not to be had in it, from snails and boudin to the Petit Journal and the latest thing in apéritifs. The one language heard is French, when it is not Italian, and the people met there have an animation that is not a characteristic of Kensington or Bayswater. The only trouble is that if the snails are of the freshest and the apéritifs bear the best mark, the quality of the people imported into the Quartier is more doubtful. Many have left their country for their country's good. When I made my mission known, caution was recommended to me by Madame who presides chez le patissier, and Monsieur le Gros, as he is familiarly known, who provides me with groceries, and M. Edmond from whom I buy my vegetables and salads at the Quatre Saisons. England, in the mistaken name of liberty, then opened her door to the riff-raff of all nations, and French prisons were the emptier for the indiscriminate hospitality of Soho, or so I was assured by the decent French who feel the dishonour the Quartier is to France.
Caution served me well in the first instance, for I began my experience in French charwomen with Marie, a little Bretonne, young, cheerful, and if, like a true Bretonne, not over clean by nature, so willing to be bullied into it that she got to scrub floors and polish brasses as if she liked it. She never sulked, never minded a scolding from Augustine who scolds us all when we need it, did not care how long she stayed over time, had a laugh that put one in good humour to hear it, and such a healthy appetite that she doubled my weekly bill at the baker's. Even Augustine found no fault. But one fault there was. She was married. In the course of time a small son arrived who made her laugh more gaily than ever, though he added a third to the family of a not too brilliant young man with an income of a pound a week, and I was again without a charwoman.
Marie helped me to forget caution, and I put down the stories heard in the Quartier to libel. But I had my awakening. She was succeeded by another Bretonne, a wild, frightened-looking creature, who, on her second day with me, when I went into the kitchen to speak to her, sat down abruptly in the fireplace, the fire by good luck still unlit, and I did not have to ask an explanation, for it was given me by the empty bottle on the dresser. Her dull, sottish face haunted me for days afterwards, and I was oppressed, as I am sure she never was, by the thought of the blundering fate that had driven her from the windswept shores of her own Brittany to the foul slums of London.
But I could not take over the mysteries and miseries of Soho with its charwomen; it was about as much as I could do to keep up with the procession that followed her. There was no variety of femme de ménage in the Quartier that I did not sample, nor one who was not the heroine of a tragedy or romance, too often not in retrospection or anticipation, but at its most psychological moment. I remember another Marie, good-looking, but undeniably elderly, whose thoughts were never with the floor she was scrubbing or the range she was black-leading, because they were absorbed in the impecunious youth, half her age, with whom she had fallen in love in the fashion of to-day, and for whom she had given up a life of comparative ease with her husband, a well-paid chef. I remember a Marthe, old and withered, whose tales of want were so heartrending that Augustine lavished upon her all the old clothes of the establishment and all the "cold pieces" in the kitchen, but who, we learned afterwards, had a neat little bank-account at the Crédit Lyonnais and a stocking stuffed to overflowing in the bare garret where she shivered and starved. I remember a trim Julie, whose debts left behind in France kept her nose to the grindstone, but who found it some compensation to work for J.: she felt a peculiar sympathy for all artists, she said, for the good reason, which seemed to us a trifle remote, that her husband's mother had been foster-mother to le grand maître, M. Detaille. And there was a Blanche, abandoned by her husband, and left with three small children to feed, clothe, and bring up somehow. And there were I have forgotten how many more, each with a story tragic or pitiful, until it came to Clémentine, and her story was so sordid that when I parted with her I shook the dust of Soho from off my feet, and imported from the Pas-de-Calais a little girl whose adventures I hoped were still in the future which, if I could manage it, would be postponed indefinitely. It may be true that every woman has one good novel in her life, but I did not see why I should keep on engaging charwomen to prove it.
Clémentine
